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Summary of the impact

Dr Julie Gottlieb's research on women's politicization and gender roles
in inter-war British extremist politics has had cultural impact in terms
of the understanding of, and the coming to terms with, often uncomfortable
and traumatic family memories. The personal and contemporary resonances of
this research have led the media and the public, in particular the
descendants of those still affected by the much-stigmatized political
choices of their immediate ancestors, to become closely engaged with her
work, serving to recover and understand overlooked histories. Of the
audiences of hundreds who have heard her in person and hundreds of
thousands who have listened to her on radio, several have contacted her
with information and insights that signify a deeper understanding of the
multi-faceted relationship between women and politics in the aftermath of
suffrage, in particular during the crisis years between the world wars.
Gottlieb's work has provided an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate
women who have been sidelined in political history, providing a launching
point for public discussion about women's political agency and
representation almost a century after suffrage.

Underpinning research

Dr Gottlieb's research has focused on women's engagement in political
extremism in the inter-war period, both as participants in far right
organizations and as anti-fascists mobilizing in response to crises in
international politics at home and abroad [R5]. Building on her doctoral
and post-doctoral work, her research in Sheffield since 2003 has taken new
directions by broadening the range of women's political activism under
investigation [R2]. In the 1990s colleagues Prof. Colin Holmes and Richard
Thurlow and their many PhD students established the so-called `Sheffield
School' for the study of political marginality and extremism, accompanied
by the creation of a rich and unique archive for the subject based in the
Special Collections section of the University Library. Gottlieb has built
on their insights by providing a vital gender perspective to the study of
British political extremism, and she has continued to build the archive.
All her work is undergirded by the forceful argument that British women's
political agency should not be underestimated, even when exercised in the
post-World War I atmosphere of ambivalence and anxiety about women's
enfranchisement and alleged undue political influence [R1].

This published research encompasses women in the British Union of
Fascists, women's campaigns against fascism, and the relationship between
women and foreign affairs and policy, coming to focus on the gendered
responses to appeasement in the late 1930s. Her research has contested
presumptions and prejudices about the nature of fascist organisation, and
the ways in which women enacted their new citizenship rights in the
aftermath of suffrage. Where once it was widely believed that fascist
organisations were male chauvinist and male supremacist and spurned
women's participation, she has shown that the British Union of Fascists
(BUF) welcomed female participation, even attracted former suffragettes to
leadership positions, and was ambivalent rather than hostile to feminist
discourse and aspirations. By corresponding with women who had been
members, creating contacts with their descendants, and compiling an
ongoing `who's who of women and British fascism', it has become clear that
women joined the movement of their own free will and for their own
reasons; in the British context where fascism failed, women were never
coerced but exercised their political free will. They were motivated by
ideology, xenophobia and racism, a particular take on women's rights (an
ultra-patriotic feminism), and sometimes for more personal reasons such as
the appeal of the uniform and that of some of the young men donning the
blackshirt [R5]. They did not suffer from false consciousness, which was
the too-convenient explanation proffered by some socialist and feminist
politicians and scholars. Indeed, by examining the construction of
masculinity in the movement and the development of innovative political
technologies developed to try to circumvent the media blackout of the BUF,
Gottlieb has argued that the movement was far from marginal or out-of-step
with the mainstream in British politics or the prevalent gender order [R3,
R6].

While breaking new ground by exposing the significance of women's
participation in fascist movements, she has also opened up the opposite
and adjoining field, namely women's resistance to fascism at home and
abroad [R4]. Just as women had been largely left out of the story of the
BUF, they have been sidelined in the more heroic narrative of
anti-fascism, the Popular Front, and anti-appeasement. Her original
contribution demonstrates that political women's deepening interest and
engagement in foreign affairs signals the diversification of interwar
feminism, rather than its retreat after the heady days of the
headline-grabbing suffragettes.

References to the research

All of these publications were peer reviewed by at least two academic
readers.

R1. Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, "Introduction" (pp. 1-18), and
"'We were done the moment we gave women the vote': The Female Franchise
Factor and the Munich By-Elections, 1938-1939" (pp. 159-180), in eds Julie
V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, The
Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) [This volume emerged from the June
2011 International Conference "The Aftermath of Suffrage: What Happened
After the Vote Was Won?", organised by Dr Gottlieb at the University of
Sheffield.]

R2. "Introduction", pp. 137-140, and "`Broken Friendships and Vanished
Loyalties': Gender, Collective (In)Security and Anti-Fascism in Britain in
the 1930s," Politics, Religion and Ideology, (Special Issue
`Women, Fascism and the Far Right, 1918-2010', ed. Julie V. Gottlieb),
13:2 (2012), pp. 197-219 [This journal was formerly Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions and it remains a leading
specialist journal in comparative fascist studies. Gottlieb was invited to
guest edit this special issue.]

R3. "Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-war
Period," Contemporary European History, 20:2 (2011), pp. 111-136
[This is a leading journal in the field]

R5. "A Mosleyite Life Stranger than Fiction: The Making and Remaking of
Olive Hawks," in Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds), Making
Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in Modern British
Politics, (London: I.B Tauris, 2005), pp. 70-91 [Submitted to RAE
2008] As Kevin Jeffreys wrote in his review of Making Reputations
(Twentieth Century British History [2006]): "in arguably the most
stimulating article in the collection, Julie Gottlieb writes about the
life of a little-known fascist activist, Olive Hawks. As well as adopting
an interdisciplinary approach, using literary criticism and psychological
analysis to help compensate for a lack of traditional evidence such as
memoirs, Gottlieb challenges `the boundaries of feminist biography',
putting the spotlight on `a woman who does not elicit much sympathy and
who does not stand out as an exemplary feminist life'.

R6. "Women and British Fascism Revisited: Gender, the Far-Right and
Resistance," Journal of Women's History, 16:3 (2004), pp. 108-123.
[Gottlieb was invited to assemble and contribute to this special issue;
submitted to RAE 2008]

Details of the impact

The impact of Dr Gottlieb's work has resulted from the process of sharing
her research with a wide and diverse audience, including: a range of local
community groups, regional and national audiences on BBC Radio, the
readership of the BBC History Magazine, and as a podcast. These
activities have resulted in some striking transformations in personal
understanding.

This work has had a particularly powerful impact on communities whose
identity was forged out of the disruptions caused by fascists in the
1930s. She has been invited to address community-based Jewish historical
societies. Speaking on "BUF women" to the Leeds Jewish Historical Society
on 7 September 2009, the audience of 40 members was amazed to learn that
women were both the purveyors of anti-Semitism and its victims. This
stimulated a discussion about the often conflicting and contradictory
narratives recorded in personal testimony versus scholarly research. She
appeared on `The Jewish Citizen' on BBC Radio Manchester (10,000
listeners) on 7 November 2011 to talk about her research on women and
anti-Semitism and to publicise her upcoming talk on behalf of the charity
Shaare Zedek UK in November, 2011, speaking on "Blackshirts and
Broomsticks" [S2, S9]. As the host and chair at the Shaare Zedek event
(audience of c.35) commented in a personal communication to Gottlieb, "some,
as you know were already informed to a degree, but you highlighted
details they were not aware of which stimulated not only discussion on
the night but I know they shared what they learned with other members of
the Manchester Jewish Community. Your talk revived memories of fascism
in Britain and provided a forum for the discussion of how to develop
strategies to combat present day anti-Semitism" [S4].

Gottlieb's work has attracted a wider audience and media attention due to
public interest, intellectual and often personal, in the participation of
politically active women on the far right. About a dozen times she has
been contacted by genealogical researchers, such as the granddaughter and
great-granddaughter of ex-suffragette fascist Norah Elam. Using
Gotttlieb's research as a launching pad for their own study of their
ancestor, Mosley's Old Suffragette (2010/13, ISBN 978-1446699676),
the granddaughter first contacted Gottlieb in 2008: "I am learning
about [my grandmother's] activities with great incredulity and some
ambiguity given what is coming out, but have to congratulate you on an
excellent book, [Feminine Fascism], which is so well written that I can
follow, understand and grasp some of the significance of the role of
women like Norah in that period of British history".

Descendants of BUF women have contacted Dr Gottlieb requesting more
information, and their confrontations with their fascist family histories
have been transformative. One descendant first contacted Gottlieb about
her mother and grandmother: "I have read, with great interest, your
powerful and detailed accounts of female fascists in Britain in the
1930's and 40's...My specific interest stems from my own family history.
My grandparents... were members of the BUF, and my mother, as a child,
was a participant in rally's [sic], campaigns and anti-Semitic activity".
The producer of "My Mother was a Blackshirt" (a half-hour slot which aired
midday on BBC Radio 4 on 4 January, 2010) is another case in point.
Gottlieb acted as historical consultant and talking head on the programme.
She spent many hours in discussion with him, helping him to situate his
own mother's experience in a wider context, and she placed him in touch
with other descendants of BUF women who then contributed to the programme.

Gottlieb has supported people interested in inter-war political extremism
through her work with Special Collections at the University Library, which
has one of the richest collections available for studying this subject.
She has facilitated the deposit of new material from private collections,
for instance from the holdings of the Friends of Oswald Mosley, and she
has directed genealogists and non-professional historians to these
collections, which have been consulted by 51 external users during the
census period.

Her work on the impact of suffrage has also excited public interest. She
organised, together with Prof. Richard Toye (Exeter University), an
international conference on "The Aftermath of Suffrage" at the University
of Sheffield, 24-25 June 2011. The 50 delegates included 7 or 8 students
and interested persons from outside academia. She convinced the producers
of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour that this was a topic that would
interest their diverse national listenership, and she was interviewed
together with Prof. Pat Thane by Jennie Murray on Woman's Hour on
the morning of 24 June 2011 (average Friday audience, 1.36 million) [S1].
Sheffield listeners of her Woman's Hour appearance contacted her
to invite her to give a lecture on "Suffrage—What Happened After the Vote
was Won?" to the Time Well Spent Group (a local luncheon discussion group
for seniors) in Sheffield on 31 May 2012 to an audience of 60. Through the
discussion that followed, it became clear that these women and men,
despite having lived through Second Wave Feminism, were surprised to learn
about the continuing gender gap in politics and the long campaigns waged
by women to be part of the political process. In addition, she was
commissioned by the BBC History Magazine to write a feature
article: "Guilty Women?" that appeared in the Christmas 2011 edition, and
she was interviewed by podcast for the Magazine (70,000 copies sold per
issue, and a readership of 250,000) [S7]. Placing Margaret Thatcher in a
trajectory of women's politicization on the Right, Gottlieb published a
blog, "Which Witch is Which: Margaret Thatcher as Lady Politician" two
days after the death of the former Prime Minister—it had 629 visits by
June 2013 [S6].

From her vantage point as a historian of women and Europe in the first
half of the 20th century, Gottlieb has also made public
appearances speaking about her late mother's Holocaust memoir, published
posthumously. In August 2008 she was interviewed about this on BBC Radio
Manchester. This led to an invitation to make a 50-minute presentation,
with visuals, to the Manchester Jewish Historical Society at the
Manchester Jewish Museum (audience c. 40 people) in June 2010 [S5], and
she presented a similar paper to Group Sixty-Two in Sheffield on 6 July
2011 (audience c. 30 people). The organiser of the latter wrote to her to
express how the talk "had heightened understanding of the generational
effect of involvement in the Shoah". On both occasions a forum was
created for sharing memories of Holocaust experiences and confronting
emotional memories of family trauma and mother-daughter relationships. On
8 April 2013, Yom HaShoah, she addressed the Juniors (over 100 pupils) at
North Cheshire Jewish Primary School on "The Holocaust Through the Eyes of
a Child". On behalf of the pupils, a teacher wrote to her: "We were
drawn in by your mother's moving insights into a child's view of the
complex happenings during the terrible period of World War II... Your
brilliant presentation for us will be treasured in our minds for the
rest of our lives" [S3].

In sum, Gottlieb's research has provided a forum for intellectual and
emotional interaction between diverse communities and across the
generations. It has enabled those personally affected by the dislocation
and the stark political polarization of the interwar years to come to
terms with the past.